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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

You are quite literally blaming the victim.

No the victims are the dead people it didn’t protect - they aren’t blaming them. They’re blaming people who didn’t do due diligence when buying it.

Exactly, these people are in position of power, with mutiple degrees, staff and million dollar equipment. They are not just a rando off the street

Exactly. I'm being tongue-in-cheek when I say he shouldn't be charged with fraud.

But if people died because of this, he definitely should not be considered liable for their deaths. That lies strictly with the people who bought this without thinking about it for even two seconds.

People who spend money on a useless products are also victims. Of fraud. Yes, even particularly clueless people should be held blameless of the crimes of fraudsters.

To be fair, you have to be pretty damned stupid to actually believe this device would work. So it's hard to believe that the "victims" weren't in on this somehow.

the victims were the people who died from undetected bombs going off.

I doubt they had any knowledge of what devices were being used to sweep areas for bombs

It's incredibly unfortunate and disgusting that people died because this fake device was used in real settings, but that's obviously not the context being discussed here.

Blaming the victim isn't necessarily always wrong.

The definition of 'Victim' is thay they are not the one at fault

No it isn't. Someone who succumbs to lung cancer after smoking 1000 cigarettes a day for 20 years is still a victim of lung cancer. The definition of victim says nothing about causation.

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